Our Party's History

Although Republicans like to call themselves the Grand Old Party, or GOP for short, the Democratic Party is grander and far older. In the early 1790s Alexander Hamilton founded the Federalist Party, and supporters of Thomas Jefferson soon after formed the Democratic-Republican Party to promote Jefferson as the better alternative to Federalist President John Adams in the presidential election of 1800. While Federalists were strongest in New England and the larger cities in the Middle Atlantic region of the young country, the Democratic-Republicans had equal, or better, strength in the south and the more rural parts of the Mid-Atlantic states. The Federalists favored policies that would benefit businessmen and bankers, while the Democratic-Republicans were more representative of the agrarian population and were acknowledged as the party of the "common man", supporting individual rights over the rights of the elite. 

After Jefferson's election in 1800 the Federalist Party began to go into decline, fielding its last presidential candidate (Rufus King) in 1820, and disappearing altogether shortly after, leaving the Democratic-Republican Party as the sole party of power until 1834. Indeed, the election of 1824 had four presidential candidates on the ballot, all Democratic-Republicans. The two main contenders in that election were John Quincy Adams, generally referred to by party insiders as "Quincy", and Andrew Jackson. Jackson was rightly seen as a supporter of the common man, while Quincy was favored by the aristocratic rich. Although Jackson had both the most popular and electoral votes, four candidates on the ballot resulted in nobody obtaining a majority in the electoral college, and so the outcome, per the 12th Amendment of the Constitution, was to be decided by the House of Representatives where the former President's son had stronger support, and thus was elected by that small body to become our young nation's 6th President.

Between 1824 and 1828 factionalization within the Democratic-Republican Party became deeper and more pronounced. Eventually, opponents of Jackson broke away altogether from the Democratic-Republican Party, founding a new party known as the Anti-Jacksonian Party and later changing their party's name to the National Republican Party (no direct relationship to today's Republican Party). To minimize confusion by voters, the remaining members of the Democratic-Republican Party dropped the "Republican" portion of their party's name and the party became known as simply the Democratic Party for the 1828 election. Historians point to that renaming as the beginning of what they often refer to as "the modern Democratic Party". With only one Democratic candidate and one Anti-Jacksonian candidate on the ballot, Jackson easily defeated Adams, getting more than double Adams' number of electoral votes.After the crushing defeat they endured in 1828 the Anti-Jacksonians soon disbanded their party, but many of them began referring to themselves as "Whigs", adopting the name of the English party that opposed the concept of an absolute monarchy in Great Britain. This was intended to be a jab a Jackson, who they felt acted more like a king than as a President.

Jackson's presidency solidified several positive positions of the Democratic Party, some of which endure to this day. However, there were other facets of Jackson and his party that we take no pride in. Jackson promoted the rights of the common man, especially farmers, and democracy, which endure within our party. On the darker side, Jackson's treatment of Native Americans was deplorable and he was a proponent of slavery. He advocated westward expansion, but wanted to push indigineous people out of their ancestral homelands to achieve that expansion and wanted the institution of slavery to be prevelant in the newly settled territories. So historically, he was a mixture of the very good and the very bad, but his positions were extremly popular in his day. In 1832 he won re-election easily over Anti-Jacksonian Henry Clay and two minor party candidates. When Jackson made it known that he would not be seeking a third term the Anti-Jacksonians no longer had a common enemy and their party disbanded, leaving the Democratic Party as the only major party.

Predictably, in 1834 many former Anti-Jacksonians, along with members of minor parties and some disaffected Democrats, joined together to formally establish the Whig Party. The Whigs fielded four candidates in 1836 but none could pull enough votes away from Jackson's Vice President, Martin Van Buren, to get the election thrown, once again, into the hands of the House of Representatives. They were able to win the Presidency in 1840 and again in 1848, but in both cases their successful candidates would die in office during their first term, and in both cases they were succeeded in office by Vice Presidents who were Whigs in name only. By 1850 both parties had become seriously factionalized by the issue of slavery. In the case of the Whigs, division within the party around that issue was so pronounced that it literally tore the party apart and the Whig Party disbanded shortly after the 1856 election..

In 1854 a new party was formed from remnants of the Whigs, members of a few minority parties and abolitionist Democrats. It was primarily based in the northeast quarter of the country, and was largely formed to be an abolisionist party. The new party, which called itself the Republican Party, competed against the Democratic Party and what remained of the Whig Party, coming in in second place behind the dominant Democrats. Democrat James Buchanan would win the election of 1856, but he would be the last Democrat to reside in the White House until 1885.

Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 put the Republican Party in control and sparked the Civil War. Much of the Democratic Party's base was in the southern states which would attempt to secede from the union, and southern policticians were essentially expelled from any government positions during Reconstruction. Eventually, the party would become a political force again in the nation, but they would not be a major player again until the election of 1884 when Grover Cleveland would win one term in office only to lose his re-election bid four years later. From that point on, power in the country would move back and forth between Democrats and Republicans until 1932 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Republican Herbert Hoover.

Hoover, and Republicans in general, had embraced an economic theory that Will Rogers famously called the "Trickle Down Theory". In essence, the theory says that if you enact policies that benefit the wealthy they will pay their workers better and the whole economy will thrive. Trickle Down Economics, more recently dubbed "Supply Side Economics", endures to this day as the economic policy of the Republican Party, but it didn't work for Hoover. Subsequently, the Great Depression hit the poor and the middle class the hardest because little, if any, of the wealth of the aristocrats actually trickled down to anyone else. Average Americans turned out in droves in 1932 to support Franklin and the "New Deal" that he was promising and gave Roosevelt one of the biggest electoral victories in American history.

FDR's New Deal was enourmously successful. It put nearly 13 million out-of-work Americans back to work building much of the infrastructure that we have today. Schools, hospitals, paved roads, bridges, dams and much more served to modernize America and made what had been a largely second-class country into a modern world power. Elderly retirees, widows, orphans and the disabled were no longer completely dependent on their families for financial needs because Social Security had been put in place. Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented third term, and then a fourth, but died in office less than three months after his fourth inauguration. During his three full terms Roosevelt modernized America and, prior to our own entry into WWII, supported our European allies in their fight against fascism with a "Lend-Lease" program to provide them with necessary military equipment. The United States officially joined the war effort in Europe and the Pacific Theatre after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, He quickly transformed our industrial base into a streamlined war machine, building planes, ships and tanks better and faster than anyone had previously imagined was possible.

Nobody will ever claim that the Democratic Party has always been perfect. In fact, prior to the Civil War it was largely the pro-slavery party. During and after Reconstruction, Democrats, particularly in the southern states, largely stood for racism and segregation. Although he, himself, was not racist, Roosevelt was unable to change that attitude in others. Democrats were largely split into two factions, with the dividing lines drawn largely along the lines of "for or against" calls for racial equality. Possibly Roosevelt's most redeeming feature was the fact that he was capable of bringing both sides of the racial equality issue together for the greater good of the country.

Upon FDR's death Vice President Harry Truman became President. Truman presided over the end of WWII, including the world's only use of nuclear weapons to bring the war in the Pacific to a much swifter conclusion, saving countless American and Japanese lives. Although Truman is usually overlooked in the history of civil rights in America, he was really one of the earliest civil rights advocates in the Democratic Party, which previously had once been the party that supported slavery and later segregation in the southern states. In 1948 Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which declared “that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” In short, it was an end to racial segregation in the military, a political act unmatched since the days of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Truman was underappriciated in his day, but he was the one to begin the transformation of our party from the party of racial injustice to the party of civil rights for all Americans. 

When Truman ran for re-election in 1948 the divisions within the Democratic Party were so pronounced that a significant number of elected Democrats with segregationist and racist views broke away from the party to form a new, thankfully short-lived, third party officially known as the States' Rights Democratic Party. Despite strong performances in the south by the Dixiecrats, as the members of the new party were generally called, Truman won re-election by a narrow margin, and continued to champion Civil Rights. After the election the Dixiecrats disbanded, with the more moderate members returning to the Democratic Party and some of the more extreme segregationists switching to the Republican Party, where racist views were gaining more acceptance.

In 1952 America elected Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican to win the Presidency since the Great Depression. Widely acclaimed as a war hero, the Commanding General in the European Theatre of WWII was a popular figure in the country. As an Army General, he had avoided politics during his military career, but both parties wanted him as their candidate for President in 1952. He ultimately decided to run as a Republican and easily beat Democrat Adlai Stevenson II both in 1952 and for re-election in 1956. Stevenson won only in the "Old South" where Democrats were still the stronger of the two parties, by a huge margin. Eisenhower was a very moderate Republican by today's standards, carrying on and even expanding many of the programs of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. However, both he and his Vice President, Richard Nixon, were staunchly opposed to Communism, and Eisenhower's eight years in office marked the true start of both the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the deployment of "advisors" to South Vietnam in 1955, with the first deaths in Vietnam by U.S. soldiers in 1959.

The election of 1960 pitted Vice President Nixon, on the Republican side, against Senator John F. Kennedy. Kennedy won by a small popular margin, but it was a decisive 303-219 win in the electoral college. JFK inherited a raging Cold War with the Soviets, an impending hot war in Vietnam and racial strife in our own country. Plus he needed to develop a working relationship with a Vice President who had been, until just recently, his most bitter political rival within his own party, Lyndon B. Johnson and an FBI Director named J. Edgar Hoover that he didn't trust, for very good reasons.

Kennedy's time in office was cut short by an assasin's bullet just as he was about to launch his re-election campaign in 1963, and Lyndon Johnson became the new President. While Kennedy and Johnson had been barely on speaking terms when they served together in the Senate, and had been political rivals for the 1960 Democratic nomination, when Johnson took over he promised to continue with the policies that Kennedy had initiated. So, while none of his dreams became reality during his lifetime, Kennedy was actually responsible for many of the programs and policies that his successors eventually got much of the credit for. Without Kennedy's hopes and aspirations for our country, we would not have had Medicare and Medicaid as soon as we did. Thanks to Kennedy we bacame the world's leader in space exploration during the Johnson Administration, and we made enormous strides in the quest for civil rights for all Americans, regardless of skin color.

It was during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations that the two political parties completely traded places when it came to civil rights. Once the pro-slavery party, the Democratic Party became the party of integration and equal rights for African-Americans. Once the party of abolitionists, the GOP began welcoming former Democrats who were opposed to integration and equal rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, once considered to be a Republican proposal was embraced by Democrats in the federal government and opposed by conservative Republicans. It was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Johnson, becoming the most significant accomplishment of Johnson's only full term.

Johnson's Presidency was hamstrung by an escalated and unpopular invovlement in the Vietnam War, which resulted in a large number of anti-war protests across the country. Those protests, coupled with a renewed push for enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, especially in the south, resulted in Johnson not seeking a second full term in office.